L e a d   S t o r i e s:
S1000D standard takes flight as fighters and airliners join forces
Navy ditches paper overboard

E x t r a:
DCL/e-JITI webinar - Benefits of content reuse
Pharmaceutical industry: SPL compliance webinar

O t h e r   N e w s:
Australian mining industry digging S1000D benefits
"Paper kills" says Newt Gingrich... and Hillary Clinton agrees
Pets lap up open access veterinary site
Ninety thousand books take a hike - making way for virtual learning
Health care industry springs into digital action - finally

A s i d e s:
The cabaret act will begin shortly in court number 3...

F a v o r i t e s:
Popular articles from recent issues

LEAD STORIES

S1000D standard takes flight as fighters and airliners join forces

A collaboration between the Air Transport Association (ATA), Aerospace and Defense Industries Association of Europe (ASD) and Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) is injecting civil aviation requirements into the S1000D specification - creating a single, global standard for technical publications. DCLnews reports.

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Navy ditches paper overboard

Warships from navies around the world are ditching paper navigational charts and technical manuals for paperless systems. Plus British Navy using S1000D specification for its new Type 45 destroyer. DCLnews reports.

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EXTRA

DCL/e-JITI webinar - Benefits of content reuse

DCL and content management experts e-JITI are joining forces to present an exciting webinar about content re-use and its benefits. If you are serious about managing your organization's data and content, do not miss this informative webinar.

Studies show most document collections contain more than 50% redundancy, meaning that most companies maintain twice the content they need at twice the expense. The result is the waste of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours each year. With content reuse, you can:

• Reduce the size of your documentation set significantly.
• Update materials faster.
• Attain consistent information.
• Lower translation and conversion costs.

In this webinar Don Bridges from DCL will show how DCL's tool, Harmonizer, can easily help you eliminate redundant content.

Please join us next Wednesday, June 29th at 1:00PM Eastern (10:00AM Pacific). Register here for webinar:

http://www.dclab.com/eJITIWebinar.asp

Pharmaceutical industry: SPL compliance webinar

Are you one of the hundreds of companies in the biopharmaceutical sector facing the challenge of meeting the FDA's Structured Product Labeling initiative, due to be enforced October 2005? If so, you will likely be aware of the range of implementation solutions that exist - from outsourced conversion through advanced content re-use and single-source publishing.

During a free one-hour online seminar A Roadmap to SPL Compliance, presented by Jake Nadler, Vice President of Business Development at Intrasphere and Don Bridges, Manager of Life Sciences Projects at DCL - all will be made clear. You will learn the details, differences, benefits and risks of each approach, and there will be solid advice on how to make the right choice for your company.

A Roadmap to SPL Compliance will take place Tuesday, July 26th at 11 AM ET.

This is an online seminar that you can attend using your telephone and a Windows-based Java-enabled browser. To register, click here.

OTHER NEWS

Australian mining industry digging S1000D benefits

The S1000D standard used by the military for technical documentation is set to become a global standard - now even the Australian mining industry is getting in on the act. Two IT specialists in Australia are teaming up to provide an integrated software solution that will let firms produce interactive documentation systems that support the generation of smart maintenance information.

The partnership between Absolute Data Group (ADG) and Pennant Australasia will provide management and delivery of S1000D maintenance information. It will do this by using Pennant's Omega software's ability to produce S1000D data modules, and ADG's R4i CSDB software, which offers one click creation of smart interactive electronic technical publications and hard copy output.

ADG director Tammy Halter says this means companies can benefit from an integrated solution that is standards based. "Today, customers expect documentation to be more than simple electronic delivery. They expect an interactive and integrated application," he says. "Currently many companies hold and output data about their maintenance requirements in proprietary formats and need to manage two disparate information systems. But by combining Pennant's logistics support analysis software and ADG's technical publishing system, the time and cost to deliver maintenance information to the field is significantly reduced."

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"Paper kills" says Newt Gingrich... and Hillary Clinton agrees

In the "who'd-a-thunk-it" column, Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton agree on the need for electronic medical records. Gingritch is said to be "thrilled" to be part of the bipartisan effort to reduce the amount of paperwork the health care industry creates and move to electronic record keeping. "Paper kills," he said. "This is not complicated. If you see paper in the health system, it risks killing people." Clinton agrees, "I find he and I have a lot in common in the way we see the problems that we're going to have to deal with in order to have a 21st century health care system," she says.

If the bill, known as The 21st Century Health information Act, is introduced it would mean that interoperable regional health information networks would be created to transfer health data quickly between medical staff and hospitals. This would save lives and money by eliminating preventable medical errors, reducing unnecessary duplication of testing, and enhancing patients’ health care experience.

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Pets lap up open access veterinary site

Millions of pets are set to benefit from the latest move to make research freely available on the web. British open access publisher BioMed Central(BMC) has launched BMC Veterinary Research, the first international open access journal to cover veterinary science and medicine. It will publish peer-reviewed research and methodology articles as well as original research articles in all aspects of veterinary science and medicine.

"BMC Veterinary Research will be greatly welcomed by the research community involved with advancing veterinary science and medicine. The benefits of open access publishing, which has proved so successful in human medicine and biological sciences, will now be available for the wide range of specialties that are encompassed in veterinary research," said Professor David Eckersall, a BMC editorial board member from the University of Glasgow.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which coordinates information technology at UK universities, encourages the creation of open access journals and funds free access for universities to journals published by BioMed Central. This has increased awareness of open access publishing and as a result submissions to BioMed Central's journals by UK academics have increased by 180% and downloads by the British public have more than doubled.

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Ninety thousand books take a hike - making way for virtual learning

In the 90’s it was law firm libraries now it’s universities. The University of Texas is moving 90,000 books from its undergraduate library this fall. This will free up 6,000 square feet to create a virtual learning environment. The new look library will have more access points for laptops, flexible furniture that can be moved around to accommodate study groups and additional staff to help with multimedia presentations and online research.

"[Students] study differently than they used to, so there's the changing user behaviors, the changing curriculum, and what we're able to offer online makes a little more sense to not concentrate so much on the print book and concentrate more on the space and how the students interact in the spaces they really need," said Damon Jaggers, associate director for student services for the University of Texas Libraries.

While the benefits of the project are apparent, some students will undoubtedly feel nostalgic: "I actually enjoy wandering the bookshelves and just randomly picking up books, and so I'd miss the serendipity of just picking up a book, but I also enjoy surfing the web and the group study does help," student James Chen said.

The books will be dispersed to different libraries across campus, with around 45,000 going to the Perry-Castenada main library.

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Health care industry springs into digital action - finally

On Monday June 6 the U.S. government took its first definite steps towards every citizen having electronic medical records. Set in motion over a year ago by President Bush, and endorsed by many leading politicians like Newt Gingrich and Hilary Clinton (see above story), the move aims to eliminate the need for paper records, within ten years. "We've been in the mode of probing and listening for the past year. Now, we're into the action phase," said David Brailer, the government's first national health care tech coordinator.

America's health care industry, which encompasses more than 700,000 doctors and thousands of hospitals has been slow to adopt information technology due to the fact it is so big and fragmented. More than 85% of US doctors still rely on paper records, which can delay the flow of information between themselves, hospitals and labs.

Under the proposal doctors and hospitals would use secure Internet-based health care networks to share patient's medical records. There would be an agreed set of data standards so that information is easily transferred between parties.

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ASIDES

The cabaret act will begin shortly in court number 3...

We’ve had our fun with airlines in recent issues. We figured it was time to laugh at lawyers a bit. We recently came across a little book called Disorder in the Court: Great Fractured Moments in Courtroom History by Charles M. Sevilla. It contains actual exchanges that took place in American courts. Those who think that the activities of the law courts are largely somber affairs may wish to reconsider their opinion, after reading these examples. The court reporters who had the job of recording these exchanges must have called on all their reserves to maintain straight faces!

Here goes...

Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?!
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere.

Read More...

FAVORITES

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